“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”

—Emily Dickinson

“Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.”

—A. E. Housman

“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings . . . recollected in tranquility.”

—William Wordsworth

“The poet is the sayer, the namer.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Poets are . . . the unacknowledged legislators of mankind.”

—Percy Bysshe Shelley

Over the centuries poetry has been described or defined in numerous different ways. One of the simplest and most memorable definitions is that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, author of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Coleridge defined it as “the best words in the best order.” Simple as it is, his definition points up the truth that, in a broad sense, all artful language is poetry. However, we ordinarily mean by the word poetry lan-guage writ ten in lines, or verse. The rest is prose, writing that runs from margin to margin down the page. Unlike poetry, prose is not broken into lines by the author. The line break is the essential distinction of poetry, since prose may possess almost all the other elements of poetry. We first encounter poetry as children in the form of nursery rhymes, skipping rhymes, advertising jingles, and in the works of writers like Dr. Seuss. We love their strong rhymes and rhythms, as in “Tom, Tom, the piper’s son, / Stole a pig and away he run,” though the language may be unremarkable. Here and there a line or more may rise to the level of poetry, in Coleridge’s sense of “artful language,” as one does in this rhyme:

Tom, Tom, the piper’s son, He learned to play when he was young, But the only tune that he could play Was, “Over the Hills and Far Away.”

The last line evokes by its meaning, sound, and rhythm a yearning for what is romantic and far off, and the phrase

P o e t r y

o m n i b u s i V2

and clanging rhymes of light, or comic, verse. We also learn that the purpose of poetry is “to delight and in-struct,” as the Renaissance courtier and poet Sir Philip Sydney wrote. Like all art, poetry must first please us or we’re unlikely to stay with it, but what it finally reveals to us is much of the best that has been thought and written by humankind. Sydney says in a memorable phrase, it is like “a medicine of cherries.” As his phrase suggests, poetry appeals to us through the senses—sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell, as well as the

kinesthetic sense (the sense of the body’s posi-tion or motion—as in dancing). Its musi-

cal rhythms and sounds, as well as its imagery and other components, are

more concentrated and intense than those of other genres.

One can say that a poem is an almost physical embodi-ment of thought and feeling. Mind, body, and emotions are unified in a good poem. To understand how this is

achieved, it is helpful to look at the basic elements of poetry

and consider how they work together to make the poem. These

elements are imagery, metaphor, sound, form, and content. Although I

can hardly pretend to treat these compre-hensively in a short essay, looking into them—par-

ticularly from the writer’s point of view—can provide a good start to understanding how poetry works.

How Poetry works

Imagery I mentioned above that a poem, both for reader and writer, can be thought of as a physical experience of thought and emo tion. It should be, according to the poet Keats, “felt upon the pulses.” Like all good writing, poetry is rooted in the concrete, in the experience of the five (or six) senses. Abstract words like love, grief, or joy must be incarnate in the images that make them real. Archibald MacLeish makes this clear in his poem “Ars Poetica”:

For all the history of grief An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

MacLeish is probably thinking here of a poem by Robert Frost. The empty doorway reminds the speaker, return-ing home, of the absent loved one; the single maple leaf

“Over the hills and far away” finds its way into many rhymes and ballads. Simi larly, “Ride a Cockhorse to Ban-bury Cross” ends with the remark able lines,

Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, She shall have music wherever she goes.

The lady described in the rhyme is not only impres-sively decked out, but the last line suggests something about her personality. She appears to be one of those magical people who carry an inner music with them. These rhymes make a strong impression on us when we’re young. Recalling nurs-ery rhymes, the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas confessed,

I wanted to write poetry in the beginning because I had fallen in love with words. The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for my-self I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone.

As we grow, we find a similar pleasure in comic or nonsense forms such as the limerick and the higgledy piggledy (or double dactyl). Here is a classic limerick:

There was an old monk in Siberia, Whose life grew drearier and drearier. He emerged from his cell, With a blood-curdling yell, And eloped with the Mother Superior.

Similarly, we delight in the pounding rhythms and clever rhymes of a higgledy piggledy, or double dactyl, like the following:

Higgledy piggledy, Ludwig von Beethoven Bored by requests For a tune they could hum, Finally answered with Oversimplicity, “Here’s mein Fifth Symphony— Da da da Dum.”

As we read and encounter ‘serious’ poetry in school or elsewhere, we discover that there are many different forms of the art and that few have the rollicking rhythms

Dickinson

Poetry 3

/ deep,/ inexhaustible sun.” The popular Japanese form of the haiku works al-most exclusively with images, as these two illustrate:

Melon in morning dew, mud-fresh.

Sudden sun upon the mountain path,

plum scent.1

Note that these two, like most haiku, consist of two juxtaposed natural

images that complement or contrast with one another,

often in very subtle ways. The following is a haiku-

like poem done by a student—in two lines

rather than three (it’s a bit of a riddle):

Who let the roaring yellow tigers out of their cage last evening?

—Janet Gummeson

It describes a sunset. In Japan crowds of people

will participate in haiku-writing contests. I urge you

to try one. Poetry, like all art, is rooted in

the concrete, physical world. As Alan Watts observed, “Perhaps we need

a poet occasion ally to remind us that even the coffee we absent-mindedly sip comes in (as Yeats put it)

‘a heavy, spillable cup.’” In my experience, poems begin in the world of the senses and stay rooted there, no matter where they end. What usually moves me to write is a desire to call things up by the power of words. A sensation, impression, or image will step out from its surround ings and demand my total attention: as the image reaches up toward the words, the words become the image, the thing itself. Thing becomes word, and word becomes thing. For one happy moment substance and meaning are fused. The terrible gap between experience and the articulation of experience is closed. The mind is one with what it perceives.

reminds him of his loneliness and happier times in a fall now past. In the famous balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, Romeo compares Juliet to the sun:

But soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!

Later Juliet expresses her love for Romeo in a similar cosmic image:

Take him and cut him out in little stars, And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night.

These visual images, along with a hundred others supplied by Shakespeare, sug-gest the remarkable intensity of the love for which the two lovers are famous. Visual images are the most com-mon in poetry (as indeed they are in life), but note the other senses expe-rienced in one line from Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.” The poet is wandering blind-ly among blossoming trees on a pitch-dark spring night and notes that he cannot see “what soft incense hangs upon the boughs.” The senses of touch, smell, and a kinesthetic feeling of weight are all ap-pealed to in the words soft, incense, and hangs. The speaker is alive in all his senses and alert as he listens to the night-ingale’s song. William Carlos Williams in his poetry re-peats the dictum “No ideas but in things,” and everyone beginning to read or write poetry should keep it in mind. Note the power of the images of the bones and foxes in these lines by Wallace Stevens,

Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill,

or the effect of the Chilean poet Neruda in his “Ode to the Tomato” describing a ripe one cut in half as “a fresh,

Chaucer

o m n i b u s i V4

“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the urn sug gests, in addition to the above, artistic perfection, human passion, frustration, truth, beauty, to name a few. Keats exclaims, “Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought / As doth eternity”—a good description of what a symbol will do. There are other figures of speech, all of which can be grouped under metaphor. Aristotle, in his Poetics gives metaphor, or rather the maker of metaphors, a special place: “It is the one thing that cannot be learned from others; it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarities in dis-similarities.” Aristotle’s statement might tempt you to try making a metaphor or two. One thing is almost certain, if you like metaphors, you’ll love poetry.

Sound In addition to imagery and metaphor, poetry must have the music of words. One indication of how much a person will like reading or writing poetry is how much he enjoys the sound of words. Auden said that in the case of two youths, one of whom says, “I want to be a poet,” and the other, “I like fooling around with words,” he would have more hope for the second. I recall as a child going by gas station signs in the car and reading them back-wards for the sound. “Gulf Gas” became “Flug Sag”; and the ordinary “Standard Oil” became the mythical mon-ster, “Dradnats Lio.” Most children from infancy on play with words and other sounds; unfortunately parents and school sometimes suppress this creative oral play. Rhyme is only the most obvious musical effect in poetry. The list includes onomatopoeia, alliteration, asso-nance, con sonance, and more. Actually the sound of every word in a poem interacts with every other word. Studies show the reader is aware of these—if only subliminal-ly—over the length of four or five lines. Every sound in language sounds either more like, or unlike, every other sound. Take the sound of the words oil and critic. They are so different one might say they clash, that they are anti-rhymes. The following words have much sound in common: barn, burn, moon, moan. So do decrepit, creditor, medical. Whether words clash or harmonize, the sound of all of them together is part of the music of poetry. The sound and rhythm of the words should reinforce the poem’s emotion and meaning. As Alexander Pope wrote, “The sound must seem an echo to the sense.” Read the following passage aloud to hear all sound effects that it describes (Zephyr is the south wind, and numbers refers to the meter of the piece):

The sound must seem an echo to the sense. Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows,

Metaphor Metaphor, in the broad sense, means figurative lan-guage, and is found everywhere in poetry. Narrowly de-fined, it is a figure of speech in which one concrete image, thought, or feeling is put in place of another to suggest a likeness between them. Robert Frost defined it simply as “saying one thing in terms of another.” When Romeo declares “Juliet is the sun,” he creates a metaphor. When Juliet imagines Romeo cut “out in little stars” she creates another. If either of them had used the word “like” or “as” he/she would have made a kind of metaphor called a simile. Here are two similes:

I . . . saw the ruddy moon lean over the hedge Like a red-faced farmer. And round about were the wistful stars With white faces like town children.

—T.E. Hulme

Sometimes metaphors are only implied, as in this sonnet by Shake speare:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

After comparing his age to autumn, the speaker implies that his thinning hair is like the dwindling leaves of au-tumn and like branches abandoned by singing birds. The branches shaking against the cold also suggest other ills of advancing age (palsy, sen sitivity to cold as opposed to warm-blooded youth). All of this is implicit, not spelled out; part of the pleasure of the poem is discovering it as we read the poem over several times. As in Janet Gum-meson’s poem, the object of the metaphor (the sunset) is only implied: “Who let the yellow roaring tigers / out of their cage last evening?” A symbol is a special kind of metaphor, which says many things in terms of another. An image that is a sym-bol can mean many different things—even contradicto-ry—like the ocean in Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle End-lessly Rocking” that symbolizes both life and death, time and eternity, and more. Natural objects, forces, or actions often serve as symbols—the sky, mountains, birds, for-ests, serpents, fire, or geese flying south—but so do man-made things like the Cross, a many-faceted diamond, a sword, a veil, or an electric dynamo. In Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” the bird becomes a symbol of many things, including immortality, mortality, art, ideal happiness, escape, and spiritual reality. In Keats’s equally famous

Poetry 5

And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows; But when loud surges lash the sounding shore, The hoarse rough verse should like the torrent roar. When Ajax strives some rock’s vast weight to throw, The line too labors and the words move slow; Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain, Flies o’er th’unbending corn, and skims along the main.

Earlier he has described an Alexandrine (a long six-foot line, often used to end a stanza or poem) as “a wounded

Poetry can sometimes help us “see” things even bet-ter than the visual arts. In this painting The Adoration

of the Kings and Christ on the Cross, attributed to Benedetto Bonfigli (d. 1496), the connection is made

between the Nativity and the Crucifixion. But that relationship is made quicker and stronger in a piece

by Christian poet Luci Shaw (1940– ) called, “Mary’s Song.” At the end of that poem she writes:

. . . nailed to my poor planet, caughtthat I might be free, blind in my womb

to know my darkness ended,brought to this birth for me to be new born,

and for him to see me mended,I must see him torn.2

o m n i b u s i V6

er/feather, bub ble/trouble). For the last century many po-ets have used half-rhymes (also called off- or slant-rhymes), expanding greatly the opportunities for rhyme. Frost and forest in the above poem are half-rhymes. Wilfred Owen, a World War I poet, provides further examples in “Arms and the Boy”: blade and blood, flash and flesh:

Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade How cold steel is and keen with hunger of blood; Blue with all malice, like a madman’s flash; And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh.

Finally, rhyme occurs not only at the end of lines, but within the lines, and then it is called internal rhyme. Here is one from Coler idge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared. Merrily did we drop Below the kirk. . . .

In the following four lines from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “What I Do Is Me,” there are twelve rhymes, eight of them internal, besides an abundance of alliteration and asso-nance:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame; As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name.

Rhythm: Rhythm and meter, part of the sound, are dis-cussed in the following section.

Form As I noted above, the chief formal difference between poetry (or verse) and prose is the line. The line-break cre-ates this fundamental difference between the two; all other differences follow from this one. Historically, lines have had elements added to them, such as rhyme and meter (a certain count of ac cented syllables per line). But these features only add to, and enrich, the fundamental difference. All English has speech rhythms; that is, when spoken, some syllables are stressed more than others. When one breaks speech into the lines of poetry, the line-breaks create a new, second ary rhythm modifying the primary speech rhythm. One can easily see and hear this effect in William Carlos Williams’ lines about a cat:

snake,” and slows the line to a literal crawl:

A needless Alexandrine ends the song, That like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.

Briefly, the sound effects of poetry include: Onomatopoeia: words that sound somewhat like what they denote: buzz, bang, click, snick, tintinnabula-tion, and also, skinny, slim, slender, spindly, fat, gross, huge, hog, vast. Alliteration: The repetition of consonant sounds. Note the m’s in these lines by Tennyson as you read them aloud:

The moan of doves in immemorial elms And murmuring of innumerable bees.

Assonance: The repetition and modulation of vowels. These lines by Sylvia Plath have rich vowel sounds and alliterating conson ants. Again, read them aloud:

Haunched like a faun, he hooed From grove of moon-glint and fen-frost Until all owls in the twigged forest Flapped black to look and brood On the call this man made.

Rhyme: Unlike a language like Italian, English is poor in rhymes (true rhymes, that is, such as June/moon, weath-

Poetry 7

Poem

As the cat climbed over the top of the jamcloset first the right forefoot carefully then the hind stepped down into the pit of the empty flowerpot

Because of the many line- and stanza-breaks, we hear and see the slow, graceful movement of the cat. Compare these lines to the same words written out as prose:

As the cat climbed over the top of the jamcloset first the right forefoot carefully then the hind stepped down into the pit of the empty flowerpot.

In contrast to the poem, this prose sentence seems undistin guished, and perhaps a little awkward, as we speed through it. Examining a poem’s patterns of sound, rhythm, and appearance on the page reveals its form. There are a number of different forms of poetry. The Williams poem about the cat is written in free verse, that is, verse free of both rhyme and meter (a par ticular count of ac-cents or syllables per line). In free verse pure and simple each line may be of any length the author choos es. As in the cat poem, this is the only rule. Of course, it doesn’t make good free verse any easier to write, for the breaks finally must support the overall effect of the poem. Sometimes the poet will make each free verse line a unit of syntax, such as a phrase, a clause, or a sentence. The end of each line corresponds to a natural pause in speech, as in these lines from “I Try to Waken and Greet the World Once Again” by James Wright:

In a pine tree, A few yards away from my window sill, A brilliant blue jay is springing up and down, up and down, On a branch.

This syntactical free verse is the kind the psalmists used:

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, He leadeth me beside the still waters, He restoreth my soul . . . For Thou art with me, Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemy. Thou anointest my head with oil, My cup runneth over.

Each line (or half-line, in the Hebrew) tends to parallel the structure of the other lines and repeat the point in a new way. This kind of free verse, with its parallel con-

What place does Faith play in the work of a poet? W.H. Auden turned to Christianity when his own humanistic tradition failed to provide a way of explaining or combating

the evil he encountered during the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Nazi Germany. In contrast, Alfred Tennyson (opposite) left the faith in which he was raised and near the end of his

life said that his “religious beliefs also defied convention, leaning towards agnosticism and pandeism.”

A third kind of free verse, uses the white space on a page to great effect, making an appeal to the eye as well as the ear. It is called typographical or spatial free verse because it depends on where the type is set on the page in relation to the white space. Here is an example from e.e. cum mings’ “Chanson Innocente”:

in Just- spring when the world is mud- luscious the little lame balloonman

struction, was adopted by Whitman and Ginsburg and other poets in modern times to great rhetorical effect:

And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own, And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own, And that all the men ever born are also my brothers and the women my sisters and lovers, And that a kelson of the creation is love.

—Whitman, “Song of Myself”

O my chief good,How shall I measure out thy blood?How shall I count what thee befell,

And each grief tell?

Shall I thy woesNumber according to thy foes?

Or, since one star show’d thy first breath,Shall all thy death?

Or shall each leaf,Which falls in Autumn, score a grief?

Or cannot leaves, but fruit be signOf the true vine?

Then let each hourOf my whole life one grief devour:

That thy distress through all may run,And be my sun.

Or rather letMy several sins their sorrows get;

That as each beast his cure doth know,Each sin may so.

Since blood is fittest, Lord to writeThy sorrows in, and bloody fight;

My heart hath store, write there, where inOne box doth lie both ink and sin:

That when sin spies so many foes,Thy whips, thy nails, thy wounds, thy woes

All come to lodge there, sin may say,‘No room for me’, and fly away.

Sin being gone, oh fill the place,And keep possession with thy grace;

Lest sin take courage and return,And all the writings blot or burn.

The poem Good Friday is by George Herbert, the oil painting The Road to Calvary

is by Lorenzo Lotto (c.1480–1556).

o m n i b u s i V8

Poetry 9

or syllables, or both. One of the simpler metrical forms is syllabics. In syllabic verse one counts only the number of syllables in each line. The haiku is a familiar example, of-ten written with a syllable count of 5, 7, 5 in its three lines:

The crow twitches its 5 feathers. A few snowflakes drift 7 in the damp spring air. 5

—Trevor LeGeis

These lines from Sylvia Plath’s “Dark Wood, Dark Water” each have five syllables:

This wood burns a dark Incense. Pale moss drips In elbow-scarves, beards From the archaic Bones of the great trees. Blue mists move over A lake thick with fish. . . .

In contrast to syllabics is accentual verse, in which we count only the accents per line and ignore the number of syllables, of which there can be any number. In the opening lines to Coleridge’s Christabel the number of stresses is four, while the number of syllables varies from four to eleven:

˘ ˘ ´ ˘ ˘ ´ ˘ ˘ ´ ˘ ´ ‘Tis the middle of night by the castle clock,

˘ ˘ ´ ˘ ˘ ´ ˘ ˘ And the owls have awakened the

´ ˘ ´ crowing cock;

´ ´ ´ ´ Tu–whit!—Tu–whoo!

˘ ´ ˘´ ˘ ´ ˘ ´ And hark, again! the crowing cock

´ ´ ˘˘´ ´ How drowsily it crew.

In scanning the verse, that is, counting the number of stresses or feet per line, we usually mark the stressed syl-lables with an ictus ( ´ ) and the unstressed syllables with a breve ( ˘ ). One looks like a little carrot and the other like a little hammock, as in the above verse. The most common verse form in English is accentual-syllabic, where we count both the number of accents and number of syllables in a line. It has been the predomi-nant form for hun dreds of years. Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on Snowy Evening” is a familiar example:

˘ ´ ˘ ´ ˘ ´ ˘ ´ Whose woods / these are / I think / I know.

˘ ´ ˘´ ˘ ´ ˘ ´ His house / is in / the vil / lage though.

˘ ´ ˘ ´ ˘ ´ ˘ ´ He will / not see / me stop / ping here

˘ ´ ˘ ´ ˘ ´ ˘ ´ To watch / his woods / fill up / with snow.

whistles far and wee and eddieadbill come running . . . and from his “Portrait,” Buffalo Bill’s defunct who used to ride a watersmooth-silver stallion and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjust like that. . . .

Notice how running the words together in both these examples speeds up the way you read the words, while separating them with white space slows you down or causes you to put more emphasis on a word like stallion. Typographical verse also includes shaped verse, where the words on the page may resemble everything from an apple to a coke bottle. I hope you’ll try writing a shaped poem. (Here’s a demonstration called “Urn”):

I a m

w r i - t i n g t h i s

v e r s e t o l o o k l i k e a l i t- t l e C h i-

n e s e c e r a m i c

A popular form today, it was used by George Herbert centuries ago for his poem “Easter Wings”:

Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store, Though foolishly he lost the same.

Decaying more and more, Till he became

Most poore: With thee

O let me rise As larks, harmoniously,

And sing this day thy victories; Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

Each stanza (there are two in the poem) resembles an angel’s wings when you turn the page on its side. (His example is not free verse, however, since he uses, in addi-tion to shape, both rhyme and meter.) Most poetry over the years has been written in meter, a word related to “measure.” In most metrical poetry ev-ery line has the same number of accents (stresses, beats)),

o m n i b u s i V1 0

´ ˘ ´ ˘ ´ ˘ ´ ˘ Martin married Ingrid’s sister.

So is dactylic (´˘˘), which, like anapestic, tends to gal-lop—as it does quite appropriately in Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade”:

´ ˘ ˘ ´ ˘ ˘ Half a league, half a league,

´ ˘ ˘ ´ ˘ half a league onward

´˘ ˘ ´ ˘ ˘ ´ ˘ ˘ ´ ˘ Into the mouth of death rode the six hundred.

The most common accentual-syllabic lines are five-foot iambic lines (iambic pentameter) and, second, four-foot iambic (iambic tetrameter), followed last by three-foot or iambic trimeter. The prefixes penta-, tetra-, tri- sim-ply mean five, four, three respectively. All of these, plus two-foot lines, can be found in Herbert’s “Easter Wings,” above. Unrhymed iambic pentameter, often called blank verse, is the most common form of iambic pentameter and the most common verse form in English. Shake-speare wrote his plays in this form: Hamlet soliloquizes in it, “To be, or not to be, that is the question,” and Romeo and Juliet declare their undying love in blank verse:

Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven, Having some business, do entreat her eyes To twinkle in their sphere till they return. What if her eyes were there, they in her head? The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars, As daylight doth a lamp. . . .

The meter sets up a pattern of stresses or beats for the ac-centual-syllabic poem. But there is also, playing against this, the natural rhythms of speech. The two do not al-ways agree, in which case the speech rhythm wins and changes the meter. Note the change the rhythm of speech makes in the iambic pentameter of this line from a son-net by John Donne: “Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you . . . .” In the back of our minds, like the bass beat in the background of a song, we are aware of the expected iambic meter,

˘ ´ ˘ ´ ˘ ´ ˘ ´ ˘ ´ di DAH di DAH di DAH di DAH di DAH.

What we actually hear is quite different:

´ ˘ ˘ ´ ´ ´ ˘ ´ ˘ ´ BATter my HEART, THREE-PERSoned GOD for YOU

The counterpoint, or play, of the actual speech rhythm against the anticipated pattern of the meter gives us plea-sure, just as contrapuntal rhythms do in music. Now read aloud the whole sonnet by Donne, using natural speech rhythms, and you will sense that counterpoint. You’ll dis-

Each line has eight syllables of which four are ac-cented, or stressed. Long ago people discovered that stressed and unstressed syllables often fall into repeated patterns within the line. These groups or clusters of syl-lables have been named, according to the patterns they repeat, as different kinds of feet. These feet have the exot-ic names of iambic, trochaic, anapestic, dactylic—names borrowed from the Greeks. (The feet in the Frost poem are separated by forward slashes.) These classifications of metrical feet are often misleading to beginning poets, as well as to readers, who mistakenly think that these patterns must be rigidly adhered to in a poem. In reality, most good accentual-syllabic verse will ‘violate’ metrical regularity almost as often as it fulfills it. As Robert Frost himself said, in English we basically have two kinds of meters: a rising and a falling. The iam-bic (˘´) is rising, as in

˘ ´ ˘ ´ ˘ ́ ˘ ´ Whose woods these are I think I know

and so is anapestic (˘˘´), as in

˘ ˘ ´ ˘ ˘ ´ ˘ ˘ ´ An old man took his dog to Detroit.

The iambic is the most common meter, while the gallop-ing effect of anapests is useful in light verse, such as lim-ericks. The trochaic is a falling meter as in

Namesake of the Spenserian sonnet, Edmund Spenser (c. 1552–1599) composed the epic poem The Faerie Queene to illustrate several of the Christian virtues. The poem was written, appropriately enough, in Spenserian stanza —that is, eight lines in iambic pentameter followed by a ninth line in iambic hexameter.

Poetry 1 1

cover that the natural rhythm of speech differs from the meter in many places:

Batter my heart, three-person’d God; for you As yet but knock, breathe, shine and seeke to mend; That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow mee, and bend Your force to breake, blowe, burn and make me new. I, like an usurpt towne, to another due, Labour to admit you, but Oh, to no end. Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend, But is captiv’d, and proves weake or untrue. Yet dearely I love you, and would be loved faine But am betroth’d unto your enemie. Divorce mee, untie, or breake that knot againe, Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I Except you enthrall mee, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish mee.

Notice how the pounding stresses “knock, breathe, shine”and “breake, blow, burn,” sound like the batter-ing ram of the “three-personed God” trying to enter the speaker’s heart. They radically alter the iambic meter even as they “echo the sense.”

I am interested in the precise observation of small twists and turns in people, including ambivalence, rather than

the grandiose beauty or the terrible darkness of human-ity. The poet, Scott Cairns, is a good friend of mine

and this is a portrait I thought about for at least a year before asking him to pose for me. I was most interested in his conversion to Orthodoxy and the seriousness with

which he attended to prayer. He had what looked like a string bracelet with beads on it around his wrist that he used to mark the repetition of The Jesus Prayer. He told me that when he first learned the prayer his priest

asked him to begin by repeating it 1,000 times. The string was red and my intention was to have part of it

dangle below his coat sleeve in the painting, but as I photographed him he surprised me by singing hymns, and, seeing that the prayer bracelet was not at all vis-

ible anyway, I gave up that idea and titled the painting “The Singing Poet.” As time passed and I lived with the portrait in my studio, the title became more and

more boring to me and had nothing of the intense feel-ings I had toward what I had seen in Scott; the tension

between loving God and failing Him. Scott had had some whiskey at our house the night before the photo

session and “I Drink Your Whiskey and Your Sorrow” came to me as a phrase that encompassed our being

bound to the earth, God’s care for that, and what we both do in response to it.”—Catherine Prescott

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This poem does nothing more (or less) than help us see the wheel barrow and chickens and perhaps lead us to reflect on what “de pends” upon them. A poem about some humble object may well wind up reflecting in a fresh way on one of the big subjects such as love, beauty or death. In a poem called “Tomes,” which is ostensibly about heavy books in his library, Billy Collins weighs a history textbook on his deceased mother’s food scale and finds it turns his thoughts to her,

even though it never mentions my mother, now that I think of her again, who only last year rolled off the edge of the earth in her electric bed, in her smooth pink nightgown the bones of her fingers interlocked, her sunken eyes staring upward beyond all knowledge, beyond the tiny figures of history, some in uniform, some not, marching onto the pages of this incredibly heavy book.

This may be an example of how the poem that needs to be written can come along and take over the poem the poet first intended to write. Writing a poem is often a journey of discovery. At the end of the poem we learn, as perhaps Collins learned, how the tome and his mother’s death fit together. It’s often helpful when looking for something to write about to get outside of yourself and the self’s preoccu-pations. I recommend to writing students that they try to imagine themselves as someone else, either human or animal. It is helpful to imagine what it would feel like to be a tree, insect, or inanimate object and to write from that point of view. I’ve even suggested such alter egos as a piece of dental floss, a carpet, or coat hanger. Writing the following, I imagined myself a “Deer Tick,” (the carrier of Lyme disease) addressing its victim. It begins,

No larger than a period I scramble among the sequoia of your armhairs unable to decide in this vast wilderness where to drill for the life-giving well the water of life, the warm blood. For I am sick unto death: in my abdomen the spirochete turns its deadly corkscrew which I must shortly confess to the stream pulsing from your dark red heart. . . .

Though I started by simply identifying with the in-sect, by the time I finished the poem I found the tick and the disease had become symbols of the general human

In the last century poets have be-come even more free in their use of accentual-syllabic verse. Much free verse might more accurately be called mixed meter, where there is a ghost of one or more metrical patterns behind the lines of a poem, though the line

lengths vary so much one can’t call them truly metri-cal. Much of T.S. Eliot’s free verse, for instance, appears to be written in mixed meter. Poets will sometimes mix not only meters but the free and metrical verse. Again, Eliot gives us an example in The Waste Land. (This is the best-known poem world-wide written in the last century. I might add that his longest poem, Four Quartets, writ-ten after Eliot’s conversion, is considered by many the greatest poem in English from the twentieth century.) Poetry is an art, and therefore prosody (the study of form—what we’ve just been doing) is itself an art and not a science. There is very little that is scientifically precise about it, and much depends upon individual interpreta-tion and point of view. Readers will often differ as to what the speech rhythm of a line or a piece is, depending on which words they think should be stressed. And some stresses receive more emphasis than others.

Content Unlike painting or music, poetry has all the resources of language at its disposal. It can have content and meaning, therefore, in ways that music and the visual arts can not. Po-etry can tell the story of a people, put forward a philosophy, present a vision of hell and heaven, or record the growth of a poet’s mind. It can in a brief lyric capture a frog plunging into a pond or the elusive moment of falling in love. Most beginning poets tend to think a poem has to be about one of the ‘big’ subjects: love, grief, God, art, the meaning of life or death. It takes a while for them to real-ize that they’re better off focusing on small things, such as a toad in the garden, a comb with broken teeth, a crav-ing for chocolate, or a squirrel in the attic. William Carlos Willliams wrote about the cat climbing over the jam jars, and an even more famous poem about a wheelbarrow:

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens

Robert Lee Frost (1874–1963), famous American poet who received four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry.

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us experience vi cariously the lives, thoughts, and feelings of other people in our own space and time, and of those, like Romeo and Juliet, distant in space and time. Reading and writing poetry can give us a better understanding of ourselves, of other people, of nature, and of God. Not only does it tell us in concentrated and beautiful language what we already know—”What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed,” as Pope describes it—but it provides insights into mysteries inexpressible in other forms, as does Blake’s poem “The Tyger” or these lines from Word-sworth’s “Tintern Abbey:”

And I have feltA presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.

Unlike philosophy, history, or the sciences, poetry does not exclude any human act, thought, feeling, belief, or in-tuition as not pertinent to its method; the whole spectrum is there, includ ing the spiritual. Every conceivable human attitude, point of view, or feeling has somewhere been ex-pressed in poetry. What is true of poetry is also true of the other genres and arts. The infinite variety of humanity is in all. Fortunately there are many poets whose works can feed us spiritually. A very short list would include Dante, John of the Cross, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Herbert, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Browning, Hop-kins, Thompson, Eliot, and Auden. Even poets who do not profess faith may reflect the Christian neo-platonic tradition that has been with the Church from at least Augustine. Neoplatonism, as it has been assimilated in the theol ogy of Augustine and oth-ers, maintains that God is the one source of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, and that every creature radiates something of these qualities. They shine through the ma-terial world. Some might argue that this view has been with poets from the beginning. For David and other poets of the Psalms, everything in the world contains God. It is one animating Spirit or Logos in all things that the psalm-ist celebrates:

Bless the Lord, O my soul! Who has stretched out the heavens like a tent, Who hast laid the beams of thy chambers on the waters, Who makest the clouds thy chariot, Who ridest on the wings of the wind,

malaise we call original sin. Here is another animal, a gi-ant panda, often seen in zoos or nature videos:

In the white mist of morning I find my place, a square of the sun where I can balance and chew the shoots, their green light in my mouth. I sit, my footpads shiny, taking in the dim sweet music of existence. . . .

The possibilities are endless. A word about inspiration. It’s wonderful to write a poem when you feel inspired. But what seems good in the moment of inspiration may appear flat and uninspired in the cold light of the next day. On the other hand, a poem begun with a few dry facts from an encyclopedia may catch fire as one works on it. I once saw a photo of a moose crossing a bridge from Vermont into New Hampshire. That was the germ of a poem, but I had to look up facts about the moose—dry as dust—in order to write it. Only then did I feel the poem come alive. The Muse is unpredictable—and we do need to court her in a variety of ways. A final word about content and any idea, or message, you want your poem to contain. Poems written deliber-ately to convey an idea or ‘message’ do not often succeed as poetry. It becomes too conscious a process; the Big Idea gets in the way. Save the message for an editorial , ser-mon, or essay. On the other hand, if you focus on writing a good poem about a moose, a heavy book, or a toothless comb, your deepest convictions will manifest themselves in it without your intending them to.

A Christian Response Shortly after 9/11 The New Yorker and other maga-zines invit ed readers to send in poems (either their own or by others) to express what they felt in the face of the terrorist atrocity. Only in poetry did people find words to express adequately their grief and horror at the ‘un-speakable’ event. Next to sing ing in the shower, poetry may be the most universally practiced art. It seems nearly everyone at some point in life tries to write a poem. Certainly most people would agree with the bumper sticker, “Poetry says it best.” The fact that they are poetry is one reason the psalms are the most popular book in the Bible. The poet William Carlos Williams claimed, “It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” Poetry captures experiences and expresses feelings and thoughts that elude our ordinary speech and our dis-cursive prose. Among its great values is that it can help

cometh down from the Father of Lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.” This stunning-ly beautiful sentence helps remind us that poetry (and all the arts) are some of those perfect, or nearly perfect, gifts from above, from the Father of Lights. We noted earlier that poetry delights and instructs. It gives us knowledge about our world and our selves, and stimulates us to em-pathize with other people and cultures. It can motivate us to good works and inspire us to seek God.

Who makest the winds thy messengers, fire and flame thy ministers. (Ps. 104)

This tradition has certainly been part of poetry in Eng-lish from its origins to the present. As Emerson put it, “the universe becomes trans parent, and the light of higher laws than its own shines through it.” In a suggestively similar verse, the apostle James wrote, “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and

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Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,Guilty of dust and sin.

But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slackFrom my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioningIf I lack’d anything.

“A guest,” I answer’d, “worthy to be here;”Love said, “You shall be he.”

“I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,I cannot look on thee.”

Love took my hand and smiling did reply,“Who made the eyes but I?”

“Truth, Lord, but I have marr’d them; let my shameGo where it doth deserve.”

“And know you not,” says Love, “who bore the blame?”“My dear, then I will serve.”

“You must sit down,” says Love, “and taste my meat.”So I did sit and eat.

The poem Love (III) is by George Herbert, the oil painting Christ and the Pilgrims of Emmaus

is by Diego Velázquez (1599–1660).

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wrote poetry filled with epiphanies in the ordinary and extraordinary. He found them even under the smoke-choked sky of nineteenth century Birmingham: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God” he wrote,

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

The moment of epiphany leads Hopkins to praise God, delighting in every detail of creation in all its enor-mous and particular variety. Here is “Pied Beauty,” where he celebrates a spotted cow, rose moles on a trout, and even a workman’s ordinary tools:

Glory be to God for dappled things— For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough; And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim. All thing counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim: He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

The moment of epiphany leads to praise. Like the psalm-ists, Hopkins continually praises God for the natural world. Thoreau said that most of us spend our lives push-ing our house and barn in front of us. Or we may spend our lives pushing other peoples’ houses and barns, never pausing to contem plate finches wings or rose moles upon a trout. We push ahead, ignoring these promises of paradise, these foretastes of divine union. The unitive experi ence in poetry can lead us toward what Brother Lawrence, famous for practicing the presence of God in the kitchen among the pots and pans, called “the simple gaze: that loving sight of God everywhere present that is the most holy, the most solid, the easiest, the most effica-cious manner of prayer.” The exercise of the imagination through poetry can help us to discover that loving sight. The union with beauty through poetry may lead us to better experience our union with God in Christ. When you enter college, your interest in poetry and other literature may lead you to major in English. This means that you’ll read plenty of literature in other genres besides poetry: notably fiction (the short story and novel), essays, and drama. The more you read of the classics in all genres, the better your understanding of them all

Poetry does all of these things, but one of the most import ant things it does is not often discussed: our imagi-native response to a poem may give us an epiphany, a shining forth, a sudden intuition or realization, a commu-nion not easy to express. As nearly perfect things, with all their parts fitting together as one, poems (and other works of art) help us to forget our selves and experience a unity, a completeness, a wholeness, for a minute or an hour. Bruno Barnhart, a Camaldolese monk, calls this a “unitive” expe-rience, a kind of aesthetic foretaste of the union or com-munion we can experience with God. In a sense, every work of art is complete, an end in itself, and invites us into its perfection. As Bruno says,” It shines.” As in religious ex-perience, we forget our incomplete, divided selves, and for a moment are made one with what we are reading, looking at, or listening to. This unitive experience can lead us to see beyond the work of art itself to what shines through it—the world of meaning and spirit. Poetry may help us find such moments in the ordinary (and extraordinary) things in the world that surround us every day. Everything from a blade of grass, a stone, a certain slant of light, a human face, a song, a photo from the Hubble telescope, or a poem. William Blake is one who understood this contem-plative con nection. He invites us,

To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour.

To see a world in a grain of sand or a heaven in a wild flower, we must forget ourselves and become one with it. Poetry and the arts are no substitute for religion, but traditionally a servant to her. The experience of beauty, or esthetic contemplation, especially the unitive experience, may lead us toward union with God. Simone Weil, a bril-liant, and skeptical, young philosopher, was converted while reciting George Herbert’s poem “Love III,” which she had memorized for its beau ty. While reciting it to herself one day, she later wrote,

Christ himself came down and took possession of me. In my arguments about the insolubility of the problem of God I had never foreseen the possibil-ity of that, of a real contact, person to person, here below, between a human being and God.”

—Simone Weil, Waiting for God

Her witness reminds us that the experience of beauty must finally point beyond itself or it can degenerate into mere estheticism. Like images of Paradise, it points to a Heaven beyond itself. The English poet-priest Gerard Manley Hopkins

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At the end is a list of other writers you might try to read on your own, if you can’t get them in class. Don’t spend your valuable tuition on the light-weight courses offered in many departments today on pulp fiction, comic books, television series, or other trendy subjects. Look for those courses that take up the great writers of the past. Take at least one creative writing course where you can write poetry. Writing it is one of the best ways to un-derstand how to read it. Seek out literature courses from writers of poetry and fiction on the faculty. Writers love the literature itself, usually, and are less likely to spend their time on esoteric forms of French criticism or on political agendas of one sort or another. (Feminism, neo-Marxism, and neo-Freudianism, for example, are some recently fashionable critical postures.) Check with other students to find out what actually goes on in a par ticular class before taking it. As an English major, you can continue to read the great works for a lifetime. Below is a selected list of poets you might want to come to know in college so that you may continue their ac quaintance afterwards. Of the many con-temporary poets worth reading, I’ve listed only an arbitrary few. For more of these, browse antholo gies, libraries, book-stores, literary magazines, friends’ book shelves, and the In-ternet. (Most literary magazines and books can be sampled online.) Happy hunting!

—Robert Siegel

For Further ReadingWriting Poems, Robert Wallace (3rd edition or earlier, Harper Collins).

Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry, Nims and Mason, (McGraw-Hill)

The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, ed. J.D. McClatchey.

The Norton Anthology of Poetry, Ferguson, Salter & Stallworthy.

The Norton Anthology of Modern & Contemporary Poetry, Ellmann, O’Clair, & Ramazani.

A History of Modern Poetry: Vols. I and II. David Perkins (Belknap Press).

EndnotEs1 Basho, in Love and Barley: Haiku by Basho, trans. Lucien Stryk,

Penguin. 2 Shaw, Luci. Accompanied by Angels: Poems of the Incarnation.

Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2006.

will be. But the student who learns to read poetry care-fully will find his or her ability to read the other genres greatly enhanced. The major in English, handled rightly, can provide an excellent basis for a liberal education. It should help you to think clearly and to express yourself well in speech and writing. It is excellent preparation for law and the ministry, and even business and medicine, to mention only a few fields. In most English departments, however, you will prob-ably discover that most, if not all, of your professors do not share your faith. In fact, they may go out of their way to let you and the rest of their students know this. You may also discover how much time and effort literary crit-ics spend trying to convince themselves and others that writers who clearly held a belief in the supernatural, did not. My advice is not to rashly challenge this bias when you come across it. Rather, do the reading, write good pa-pers, and impress the in structor with your mastery of the material, so that when you do take exception to some po-sition you will present strong, reasoned arguments that meet with her respect. To nourish your faith, feed upon the great writers of the past, most of whom have a worldview that supports traditional Judeo-Christian values. Reading through the centuries is a great way to escape what C.S. Lewis called the narrow provincialism of our own age or century. Definitely take a whole course—a year’s course if you can—in Shakespeare. And take a course in Milton.

So . . . Who to read? Following is a selected list of English and American poets: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Marvell, Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Traherne, Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Hopkins, Hardy, Yeats, Auden, Dylan Thomas, Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Stevens, Williams, Marianne Moore, Eliot, Roethke, Robert Lowell, Plath, Heaney, Heyen, Cairns, Franz Wright, Jeanne Murray Walker

. . . and a few from other languages: Homer, Virgil, Li Po, Du Fu, Dante, St. John of the Cross, Goethe, Rim baud, Baudelaire, Lorca, Neruda, Czeslav Milosz